Thursday is election day in Ontario and somehow, a Conservative government that spent the last two and a half years managing the pandemic with a clownish and occasionally malevolent incompetence seems poised to win another four years with a majority government.  Still: I do these manifesto reviews come hell or high water, so here we go.

Let’s start with the fact that the NDP and Greens both agree that the Ford cuts to OSAP need to be reversed, all three would go further and fully eliminate all provincial loans.  This latter promise isn’t as a big a deal as you’d think: in the one year when the Wynne government’s Targeted Free Tuition program was in place, the province only issued $38.6 million in loans (though the Feds issued $1.8 billion).  The Liberal promise here is more confusing: the manifesto commitment is that they will “double OSAP funding”, while in the manifesto costing document the commitment is to “reverse OSAP funding cuts and cover tuition for those who need it”.  These two commitments are not quite the same (the latter is substantially more specific).

Where the three differ is on the costing for this measure:

	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25	2025/26
NDP	$396m	$813m	$877m	?
Liberals	$300m	$600m	$600m	$600m
Greens*	$500m	$1,000m	$1,000m	$1,000m

So, much of what is going on here is that federal and provincial data on student financial aid is so opaque that we really have no idea how many loans and grants are being issued in Ontario right now.  I probably have the best dataset in the country via FOI requests, and my data ends in 2019/20 (the first full year after the Ford cuts), a year in which Ontario issued $847 million in loans.  That figure has almost certainly increased since then and would be on pace to grow continually into the future (especially once inflation is factored into the living cost portion of the need assessment).  If you ask me, the Greens’ estimates are probably the closest to being correct but still probably underestimate the cost over a four-year period.  The Liberals’ manifesto commitment is miles off: “doubling the student aid budget” would cost well over $1.2 billion; however, “covering tuition for those who need it” might cost substantially less because of the way federal grants have increased substantially during the pandemic (though there is still a question of whether this increase will remain in place after 2023 when it is currently set to expire).

Another point of agreement among the opposition parties is to eliminate student loan interest – a policy which, as I noted back here, is going to be debilitatingly expensive if inflation stays high and interest rates rise in consequence.  The difference lies in who is supposed to benefit.  The NDP commitment is to an elimination of interest on all outstanding loans, which they claim will cost $236m in one big write-off. This seems dubious to me given that Ontario has issued over $8 billion in student debt over the last decade: even if you assume 25% of that has been paid off, this estimate implies that the future net present value of all interest payments is equal only to about 4% of total debt (at which point one might start to think maybe paying interest on student loans just isn’t that big a deal).  The Liberal promise – to eliminate future interest rate payments at an annual cost of $40m/year – is just plain weird: if they really are reversing the Ford cuts then there should hardly be any loans being issued at all so why would it cost this much?  The Green pledge to eliminate interest does not specify whether it applies to future loans only or to past ones as well.

The NDP & Greens (but not the Liberals) agree that Performance-Based Funding (PBF) is a Bad Thing Which Must Go (the NDP also insists that PBF is a Bad Thing because it is a “US-Style Funding Scheme,” which either implies that the NDP is ignorant of the fact that PBFs are in much greater use in Nordic countries than they are in the US, or that the NDP thinks that adding the word “US-style” to anything makes it seem more dangerous, or – more likely – both).  The Liberals and Greens (but not the NDP) also make commitments to increase base funding for institutions.  The Liberals want to create a $1 billion fund “for new programs and increase operating grants to colleges, universities and training schools”.  No idea what this means in practice in terms of what strings might be attached, but the funding seems to be back-ended: $100m per year in year 1 rising to $400m in year 4.  The Greens, meanwhile, want to index the base operating grant for Ontario’s post-secondary institutions to the weighted national average, and then link that to inflation (which they perhaps optimistically estimate at 2%/year).  Total cost around $3.71B over four years.

That’s all the big money stuff: after that, we’re into the miscellaneous sections.  All three parties have something in their platforms on preventing sexual violence and improving counselling on campuses.  The NDP want to conduct an audit of the sector to work out “what Ford has broken and fix it”, which sounds like a conceptual nightmare.   It also has positions on the rights of student unions, increasing paid co-op an internship programs, plus some incredibly vague stuff about supporting college-employer partnerships.  The Greens make a general reference to “ensuring consistent and fair labour standards for all faculty”.  The Liberal platform includes promises on apprenticeship grants ($2,000 per head, tied to the existing federal program), supporting northern and rural higher education ($50m/year), supporting University of Sudbury as an independent francophone university (thus bringing the provincial total to three) and enhancing career counselling and pathways including “launching an easy-to-use website for people to navigate Ontario’s colleges, universities and training programs” (the late 90s called and wants its policy ideas back).

Ok, now what about the Tories?  Well, they chose not to issue a manifesto, preferring to run on their record and their last budget.  The key changes they have proposed involve neither increases to base funding or student assistance, but rather specific investments in key research efforts (automotive research at U Windsor, for instance), or areas of labour demand (nursing and medicine, including a new medical school for Toronto Metropolitan University in Brampton).  The last budget also saw an increase capital funding for post-secondary education, mainly focused (so near as I can tell from this government’s incredibly opaque budget announcements), on colleges, a Skilled Trades Strategy ($114 m over three years) and a whopping huge increase in training through Employment Ontario.  What they might do in the rest of their term is anyone’s guess.  Chances of a rises in funding seem low, those of a rise in tuition not much higher.

Big picture: the NDP views higher education entirely in terms of making it cheaper for users, the Tories in terms of making it cheaper for taxpayers.  The Greens and Liberals want to provide more funds to both institutions and students (a welcome change, btw), with the Greens favouring the former and the Liberals the latter. 

That’s it.  Vote accordingly, folks.